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About a year ago, there was a huge swell regarding the capacity of the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Many wanted more storage – 64GB wasn’t enough. They argued that flash memory was getting cheaper, and easier to produce in large amounts, so Apple should pass this advantage on to the consumer. And yet, nothing changed – Apple has kept their capacity lineup constant: 16 GB on the low-end, and 64 GB on the high-end. 32 GB is the middle-of-the-road storage option.

So while Apple has offered the same amount of storage, the outcry has all but vanished. Are people really consuming less content, media, and apps? Or is something far more interesting happening? It would seem that, with the storage constraint being an issue, the behavior of consumers has changed. Instead of downloading movies and wanting to store them on a device indefinitely, people turn to either a rental model, or a streaming service such as Netflix or Amazon’s video services. Personally, I don’t barely consider storage when purchasing a device – almost every device today has enough space to meet my needs, and with my growing reliance on cloud services, I find myself needing less and less.

Is this trend something that is happening throughout the industry? As always, I would expect that power users (such as you, dear reader) are on the leading edge of this behavior, but with the simplicity of mobile operating systems, I doubt that the rest of the population are far behind. So, increasingly, the question isn’t “how much space does this have,” but rather, “can I connect to the internet, access Spotify and Netflix, and download my presentation from Dropbox anywhere I want?”